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Black Screen with Blinking Cursor


WhenKittensATK

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I recently picked up my Uncle's old Dell Dimension 8250 and decided to recycle it as a file server. I grabbed a Windows Server 2003 R2 copy from MSDNAA and tried to install it on a SATA drive that I'm using with a SATA to IDE adapter (since the motherboard doesn't support SATA).

 

Windows installs normally as it would up after it copies the disc files to the hard drive and restarts the computer for the first time. When it tries to boot to the hard drive to continue installing, all I get is a black screen with a blinking cursor. I did test a CentOS install and it booted into CentOS, just fine

 

Solutions I tried:

  • Recovery console commands: fixboot, fixmbr, chkdsk
  • Remove all devices, but hard drive
  • Set hard drive to boot first
  • SeaTools Hard Drive Diagnostics came up clean
  • Tested the Win Server '03 install disc in VMWare and it works

 

Solutions to try (tomorrow):

  • Update BIOS
  • Give up and use CentOS or FreeBSD (I'm not a Linux person, so this beyond me. Especially when they are mostly command line operated. Windows Server 2008 and beyond are not an option as they require 64-bit processors.)

Edited by Krazyxazn

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One problem I had when downloading a copy of windows 7 from msdnaa was that the download was bad. No matter how many times I tried it the disk that I would burn the iso image to never worked. So i had them send me a copy and didn't have a problem. It might be the same problem, windows would copy the files from the disk to the hard drive then it would reboot. When it rebooted it would go to the "log on" screen but nothing would come up for me to continue the install.

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